NEW RESOURCES

The Library of Congress is hosting an online conference for K-12 educators. “This free two-day event, ‘Discover and Explore with Library of Congress Primary Sources,’ will be held October 25-26, from 4-8 p.m. EDT and will be open to K-12 educators from across all teaching disciplines. Last year’s event brought together more than 1,500 participants for the sessions. Over the course of two days, there will be 15 one-hour sessions facilitated by Library specialists, instructional experts from the Library’s Teaching with Primary Sources Consortium and other recognized K-12 leaders. ”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Skype Translator now supports Russian. “Skype users will be able to talk in Russian and their speech will be translated in one of the other eight languages that the service supports. Translator was publicly launched last year, and since then the team has continuously expanded the language base that the service supports.”

Poor Twitter. Apparently nobody wants to buy it. “Shares in Twitter fell more than 14% on Monday following reports that all of its rumoured potential bidders have lost interest in buying the struggling social media company. The shares, which spiked last month following speculation of a takeover by companies including Google, fell $2.82, or 14%, to $17.03 in early trading after Bloomberg reported that Twitter was unlikely to receive any takeover bids.” Amazon, Apple, Snapchat.

USEFUL STUFF

A resource list from the South Carolina State Museum, and I really hope you don’t need it: Resources for Conserving Flood Damaged Photos, Antiques and Heirlooms. “Due to the recent flooding disaster many of you may, unfortunately, be dealing with damaged family photos, antiques and other heirlooms. There is a lot of information available via the internet on how to save and conserve water damaged objects, so to make it easier for those needing these resources the State Museum has created a listing of links where you can find helpful information on how best to conserve these items.”

Robin Good is the guy with the line on great Internet tools. He’s got a writeup on a tab organizer called Toby. “Toby is a free Chrome extension which allows you to save, organize into lists and sync favorite sites and links open in your browser tabs.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

If you watched the second presidential debate, how did you do it? I used YouTube, and apparently so did a lot of other people. “Sunday night’s debate attracted 63 million TV viewers, a 20 percent decline from the first. But on YouTube, debate content garnered 124 million views, a 40 percent spike compared with the first. And that’s just on YouTube. Millions of people also watched on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which both live-streamed the event.” I watched it full-screen, and after shifting back from full screen after the debate I noticed that about 766,000 people were still watching the livestream. This was maybe five or six minutes after the debate concluded.

New Atlas: Why Google’s Chromebooks make more sense than ever. “If you’ve got a good memory then you might be able to remember back to the summer of 2011 and the first Chromebooks, which appeared to less-than-universal acclaim. Despite a slow start, in the five years since these laptops have become a much more viable proposition – so what’s happened?”

Twitter is now advertising in New York City. With cryptic ads worthy of 1999. “Twitter launched a new ad campaign today around New York City, placing colorful Twitter-themed signage in some of the city’s numerous subway stations. The ads are pretty cryptic in that they don’t do much of anything to actually explain what Twitter is or why you might use it — they’re just big exclamation marks and question marks with small Twitter birds replacing the periods.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

From the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology: Snap Chat Spectacles: Reigniting Privacy Concerns Where Google Glass Left Off. “In response to various technological advancements, the expectation of privacy has evolved more frequently in the past decades than in any other period in history.[12] Prior to the digital age, the right to privacy was a more straightforward – albeit still complex – concept.[13] Now that the market is becoming saturated with wearable technologies such as Snap Inc.’s Spectacles, questions of privacy are popping up more than ever.[14] What are the consequences of constantly pointing a camera at everyone you see?”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Research: What Twitter behavior accompanies mental health crises? “A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association indicates that there were two specific types of heightened Twitter discussions in 2014 related to mental health: expected increases in response to planned behavioral health events and unexpected increases in response to unanticipated events.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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